Watch Me Paint

Paint Schoodic

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The mechanics of
selling are changing, but common courtesy (I hope) will never go out of style.

Headlights, by Carol
L. Douglas

Yesterday I wrote about the inevitability
of online sales. Until now, I’ve avoided it, preferring to sell the old-fashioned
way. But more and more professional artists are embracing the idea, and I doubt
it will go away anytime soon.

A professional artist sent me the following comment:

I still want to be in
galleries, but only a very few that I have a great relationship with. The
appeals of online selling to me are these:

No framing, you ship
only when you sell, and you can charge for shipping or not (free shipping on
small paintings is a nice thing to be able to offer your subscribers);

You can offer a
painting on multiple online venues at the same time, as long as you remember to
remove or mark them sold everywhere;

It's a nice way to be
able to offer a sale without offending your galleries.

Commercial scallopers,
by Carol L. Douglas

Most galleries have contracts with their artists that limit
their sales in the local geographical area. Artists should respect these
agreements, not just in their letter but in their spirit. If you think being an
artist is a dicey financial venture, consider the costs to run a
bricks-and-mortar store selling artwork. If a gallery has taken you on, you owe
it the courtesy of supporting its marketing efforts.

Online marketing is, in fact, a good way to do that, but as
with everything, you should talk with your galleries first. Some have specific
rules about cross-listing with selling websites. Avoid
putting yourself in the position of retrieving a painting from a gallery because
you sold it somewhere else. Your gallery deserves a commission for
work it’s showing.

A lobster pound at Tenant's Harbor, by Carol L. Douglas (courtesy of the Kelpie
Gallery)

Artists occasionally do dumb things that undercut their
relationships with galleries. Showing at other venues in violation of their
contracts is one thing. Undercutting prices in side deals is another. Even worse is saying disparaging things after a few
glasses of wine at openings. Alcohol and business don’t generally play well
together.

You, the artist, ought to be more of a salesman for yourself
and your work than anyone else. “Be relentlessly positive,” is the best motto I
can think of in sales.

If you’re doing business with a person you don’t respect,
what does that say about you?

The new sandbar, by
Carol L. Douglas

This same logic extends to social media. There is no distinction
between your identity as a person and your professional identity as an artist; you are one
and the same. “I was just being funny,” is never an excuse. People read your
Facebook posts.

Yes, galleries and artists need each other, but there is a
power dynamic at play, too. It shifts depending on who is more successful, the
gallerist or the artist. In general, we need galleries at least as much as they
need us.

I doubt that will change as we buy and sell more across the
internet. There will always be makers of merchandise and sellers of
merchandise. The names of the relationships may change, but common courtesy (I
hope) will never go out of style.

Monday, September 25, 2017

My plein air events for 2017 are all done. It’s time to
consider how to improve things in 2018.

Full Stop, by Carol L. Douglas. Part of my self-analysis is to consider what paintings gave me the most joy to paint this summer. This is a small sample.

Mary Byrom asked me why
I moved to Maine just to spend so much of my time on the road. It’s a good
question, and one I take seriously as I plan for 2018.

Boston is a cork blocking Maine’s access to the rest of the
country. I’ve been driving on I-90 for the better part of 40 years. This summer,
traffic in eastern Massachusetts seemed particularly bad. Keeping that in mind,
we timed our departure from Pittsfield to avoid the worst traffic on I-495. Instead,
we sat for nearly an hour on the Masspike outside Worcester. It was a perfect
bookend to our trip south eleven days earlier, when we rode the brakes all the
way down I-84 to New York City.

Two Islands in the rain, by Carol L. Douglas

It felt wonderful to pull into our driveway. When I got out
of my car in the far reaches of the night, there was the Milky Way, hanging
directly over my head. It seemed as if I could have reached out a hand and scooped
up diamonds.

I’ve spent the last month fighting a wicked bout of asthmatic
bronchitis. That’s a dead giveaway that I need to cool my jets.

In the belly of the whale, by Carol L. Douglas. I got to spend a day looking at the guts of a scalloper. What could be better?

Years ago, the organizers of an invitational event told me
that they did a three-year running average
of sales for each artist. Each year, the bottom 25% of performers were cut from
their roster. Friendship and sentiment were never considered. The
lowest-performing artists were replaced with new people. By giving painters a
pass for the first two years, the event gave new painters a chance to gain a
foothold in the community

I’m thinking of doing a similar analysis on my own calendar.
I want to spread my work out across a longer season. That means, sadly, cutting
some mid-summer events.

Along Kiwassa Lake, by
Carol L. Douglas. Is there anything more lake-camp than a clothesline strung
along the shore?

However, I must consider distance, convenience, and
opportunity costs. An event in New Jersey needs to yield a better return than
one in Maine. If it provides housing for its artists, it is better than an
event where I need a hotel. And any time I’m painting elsewhere, I’m not on the
docks in Camden, which might well have a better return.

I’m not sure I can design a matrix that’s as brutally, beautifully
simple as my friends at the art center's, but I can still think this through
objectively.

Penobscot Early Morning, by Carol L. Douglas. Painted from a friend's deck while drinking coffee.

Another thing I’m considering for 2018 is creating a
limited-liability corporation. I’ve never actually lost a painting student yet,
and I’m insured, but why expose my family to the financial risk?

I am revisiting the question of online painting sales. I’ve pondered
this repeatedly over the last five years. The recurring nature of the question tells me that online marketing isn’t
going away. It’s not a question of if, but when. The
changeover isn’t going to be easy; it means enabling e-commerce on my website,
changing my marketing strategy, and—most importantly—changing the way I think
about selling paintings. But it’s our current reality.

That high-level thinking will all wait, though. Today, I’m
going to just read the mail and water my tomatoes. I’ll go collect my car from
the garage and stop at the post office and the library. Perhaps I’ll walk down
to the harbor and see what beautiful boats have floated in. It’s a glorious
time of year in the Northeast and I aim to enjoy it.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Today's client is two, and she knows what she wants. “An orange cow! A
barn!” Because I’m her grandmother, she’ll get them, even though I’ve never
painted a mural before.

This is a limited-palette painting. I have red, yellow, blue
and white latex eggshell-finish wall paints. All of them run on the warm side, and they can’t make a convincing green. It’s good that I’m painting over a green
base.

This morning, I’ll extend the trees behind the barn. I’ll pop and model the
foliage a little with some acrylic paint I bought at Michael's. Then
it’s back to plain wall painting for me. There’s still a lot to do, and I'm keenly conscious of the ticking clock.

My son-in-law believes primer is a sufficient covering for
the walls. I try to explain that wall paint is a lot like a pedicure: the color
is just a bonus. What you’re really gaining is a harder, durable, more
easily-cleaned surface. “What a waste of time and money!” he exclaims.

I used sidewalk chalk to make my sketch, such as it was.

Still, when I got to a hard part, he took the roller from me, and even did a credible job. Then he went back to the mysteries of connecting their electrical service to National Grid.

My daughter is a mechanical engineer. She went to a
plumbing store in Albany to buy a fitting for their well pump. She had designed and installed the system herself. “If
you don’t know which one you need, you should hire a contractor,” the clerk sneered. Mostly, sexism of the kind our grandmothers endured is gone in America, but once in a while, it shows back up.

My granddaughter is still very short, so all the action is at the bottom of the picture.

Thirty years ago, my husband and I also did the site work and systems for our first home, also a modular. Our children are far less excitable than we were. There's no blue cloud of swearing hanging in the air these days, even as they press against their final deadline.

I never painted a mural for my own kids. Like everyone else, I
was scrambling to hold together a house, family, and job. This is one
of the luxuries of grandparenting, and I’m enjoying it very much.

Last night, my granddaughter and I did a project
review. She thinks her mural might need a black bear up on the hill. Her look of
total absorption was the same as that of an adult contemplating a painting. It
didn’t matter that my painting was done mostly with a two-inch wall brush and I don’t know what I’m doing. Her
hillside farm transported her. That’s the whole point: painting should take us
to new and different worlds.

Can I fob off a mere oil painting on her brother? I doubt it.

Meanwhile her three-year-old brother announced, “I want a
farm, too!” I have a painting of a crane I did last spring at the boatyard; I
hope I can fob him off with it.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Want to become a
caricature of yourself? Just focus on your style rather than the content of
your work.

Commissioned portrait, by Carol L. Douglas. In this instance, high-key lighting was necessary to convey the spirit of the model, and so I used it.

Art
& Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland, is a book that every artist
should read. Not only does it destroy the myth of genius, it also points out
that there is no end point in art making. The working artist can never rest on
his laurels. Art-making is a constantly-renewing process of discovery. This is
something that can be seen in the careers of every great master from Rembrandt to Monet.

A good artist investigates knotty questions. When they are
answered, he moves on, just like Omar Khayyam’s moving
finger. So often, by the time we get through the cycle of making and mounting a
body of work, we’re no longer that interested in it. We’ve moved on to another
struggle.

Castine Lunch Break, by Carol L. Douglas. For many years, I was interested in patterning. Of course, I can only say that after the fact; I didn't realize it at the time.

Most of us (especially those who have worked as commercial
artists) can mimic other painters. There’s also significant variation in how we
approach painting problems. For example, I'll occasionally paint in great detail, with lots of modeling. I was initially trained to paint that way, and I know enough
about how paints handle to be able to blend and layer them.

However, what truly interests me right now is not mastering representation,
but something far more visceral. This is more fundamental than style. Can I put
a name to the question that’s currently bedeviling me? No; I’ve learned that is
a shortcut to putting myself in a box. However, not being verbalized doesn’t
make it any less real.

After the Storm, pastel, by Carol L. Douglas, is a very old work. Is it stylistically that different from my current work? I don't think so.

I discourage painting students from ‘embracing their style,’
because to me that’s a trap that they may not be able to escape. Sometimes, what
people call style is just technical deficiency. For example, some painters
separate their color fields with narrow lines—white paper in watercolor, dark
outlines in oils. I’d like to know that they embraced this voluntarily, not
because they never learned how to marry edges.

Mature artists don’t generally think about style. At that
point, style is the gap between what they perceive and what comes off their
brush. That’s deeply revelatory, and it can be disturbing when we see it in our
own work.

Wreck of the SS Ethie, by Carol L. Douglas. This was painted in 2016, but would not have worked in a looser style, since the shipwreck and rocks provided the abstraction.

Some of us try to cover that up with stylings, not realizing
that those moments of revelation are what viewers hunger for. They—not the
nominal subject of the piece—are the real connection between the artist and his
audience.

There’s a difference between style and being stylish. I enjoy
Olena Babak’s ability to describe reflections
in a single, fluid brush line. I feel the same way about Kari
Ganoung Ruiz’ emotive, energetic highlights. Neither of these are styles.
They are, instead, self-confident skill, which results in stylish brush work.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

I’m in the western Berkshires painting the interior walls in
my oldest kid’s new house. She’s 28 and it’s her first house, and she’s very
excited. So am I; like many artists, my idea of a good vacation is to paint
walls. (Ceilings, not so much, but you must take the good with the bad.)

In artists’ oils, I like RGH paints. This is a small company
based in Albany, NY. The owner, Rolf Haerem, has been making paints since 1989,
and is a painter himself. In acrylics, I prefer Golden. Today, Golden is a large
national brand. However, it also started as a small New York business, the
brainchild of retired paint-maker Sam Golden, in New Berlin, Chenango County.
In oil painting mediums, I like Grumbacher,
which was founded in New York City in 1902. It’s now owned by Chartpak, based in Northhampton, MA. In
brushes, I like Robert
Simmons Signet.

None of these brands are sacred in themselves. They’re just
my preferences, developed over decades of painting. They work with my technique. On Monday, I
wrote that I’d used a gel medium in an emergency, and it messed with my
style. Still, other painters love it. It depends on what you’re striving for.

Nevertheless, there’s a theme running through my choices.
They’re professional grade materials. I, too, was once an impecunious student
buying student-grade materials, so I understand economy. But at some point, artists
need to buy the right stuff, or they’ll never get the right results.

The new homeowner, surrounded by her paint chips.

In wall paints, I also have strong preferences. I’ve been
painting with Benjamin
Moore for decades. I know I can drop a bead of color alongside wooden
moldings without taping or endless massaging, and I can generally get full coverage
in a single coat. As with oil paints, wall paints are made with various
combinations of pigments, binder and filler. It’s important to find one you
like.

Here in the wilds of the New York-Massachusetts border, it’s
been a problem to find it. And my budget-masters kvetch at the sticker
price. Yesterday I capitulated for expediency’s sake, and used a brand sold by
a large big-box retailer. I immediately regretted it. It clumped in the roller,
and it didn’t slide easily off my brush.

When I first arrived on Sunday, I drove up to see my
son-in-law digging a trench, sweaty and hot in the September warmth. He and my
daughter are the same age as my husband and I were when we built our own first
house. It was also a modular, also on a wooded rural hillside, and we also did
all the sitework and finishing ourselves.

I was happy to watch the lad dig. One of the consolations of
getting old is that you never need to pound another copper ground rod into
rocky soil if you don’t want to. Some jobs are best enjoyed through the rose-colored
glasses of nostalgia.